2023, book 9: The secret lives of color, Kassia St. Clair

Uneven and ultimately a little disappointing. The book is derived from a collection of columns in Elle Decoration UK, which is about as scholarly as it sounds. Juding by the collected result, I imagine a lot were written a bit closer to the deadline than one might have wished, and all were edited by a third tier college dropout (if at all). A shame, really, because there's something here.

Sometimes an editor could have helped reduce the pointless verbiage (p. 49):

Owing to its value as a precious metal, [...]

At times it's unclear whether the author is gullible or careless—in either case a better editor could have reduced the mayhem (pp. 49-50):

The first recorded appearance of the silver bullet being used to dispatch the forces of evil is from the mid-seventeenth century, when the town of Greifswald in northeastern Germany became all but overrun with werewolves. As the population dwindled it seemed as if the entire town might have to be abandoned, until a group of sudents made little musket balls from the precious metal.

The source for this nonsense is Werewolves: the occult truth by some idiot going by the single name Konstantinos. It's utter malarkey, of course.

Another instance (p. 82):

A delightfully named German merchant called Georg Eberhard Rumphius [...]

Calling Rumphius a merchant isn't completely incorrect, but a little research would have revealed that he is remembered as a botanist and naturalist, not a merchant. And again a half-decent editor could have caught the abysmal "named...called" business.

Aha! Finally something positive to call out! I learned something about the pigment minium & miniatures (p. 108):

The pigment used was minium. The person who worked with it was called a miniator, and his work, an eye-catching symbol or heading in a manuscript, a miniatura. (This is the origin of the word "miniature," which in its original sense did not mean small at all.)

Though this is all correct, it would have been nice to add that words that express smallness like minor and minimus already existed in Latin, and in fact the PIE root *mei- means small. The modern meaning of miniature was likely inspired by these.

Another place where the research was lacking (p. 137):

Coca-Cola owes its livery to the red-and-white flag of Peru, whish is where the company sourced the coca leaves and cocaines its drinks contained until the 1920s.

Several things wrong here: 1) only the very earliest form of Coca-Cola included cocaine as a separate ingredient; 2) coca leaves were always a part of the recipe and, according to most sources, still are; 3) the Peruvian flag story is utter bullshit of such an absurd degree that I cannot even find a reference to it online. You know you're out on the fucking fringe when you can't even find someone on the Web to corroborate your story. Finally, 4) Gootenberg's Andean cocaine: the making of a global drug, which is cited as the source for all this, does not mention the Peruvian flag tale (and also doesn't fuck up the coca/cocaine thing).

Oh, for fuck's sake (p. 137):

Rothko, who wrote that his art's principle concern was "the human element," layerd tone upon tone of red on his giant canvases. He identified it, as the art critic Diane Waldman put it, "with fire and with blood."

No shit? Fire and blood? You mean, like, actually fucking red things? I don't know who the bigger fraud is here: Rothko or Waldman. What a load of bollocks. And why did St. Clair feel the need to add this inane quotation?

On magenta (p. 168):

Verguin himself profited little from his creation [of magenta]: his contract at Renard Frères & Franc had signed over the rights to any color he created for one-fifth of the profits.

Issue the first: contracts don't sign over rights, people do (editor caught napping again). Issue the second: in what universe is 20% of the profit "little"? OK, perhaps if the very next sentence was "and Renard Frères & Franc never sold any of the pigment at all" then we could talk, but it's not, so we can't, and my annoyance grows once more.

On ultramarine & indigo(pp. 180-181):

Although [ultramarine] is a pigment made from a stone and [indigo] a dye wrung from fermented plant leaves, they share far more than you might imagine. Both required care, patience, and even reverence in their extraction and creation.

This is the kind of thing you write when you have a target word count and find yourself short. Most pigments require care and patience to make, so what kind of nonsense sentences are these? And what sort of unimaginative fool do you take the reader for?

On Han van Meegeren (pp. 187-188):

Rather than using the traditional linseed oil as his paint medium he had used Bakelite, a plastic that sets solid when heated. This let him fool the standard X-ray and solvent tests used to determine the age of old paintings, which take much longer to harden. He had painted on old canvases that had authentic craquelure [...]

Three problems here: 1) craquelure is the cracking in the surface of the painting, so using an old canvas won't contribute to it in any meaningful way; 2) I am highly skeptical that X-rays are used to determine how hard a painting is—they're used of course to detect underpaintings in certain pigments; 3) I'm averagely skeptical about the claim that he replaced linseed oil with Bakelite. The Fake or Fortune episode lets one believe that he mixed the two. I don't have Finlay's "The brilliant history of color in art" which is cited as the source for these claims.

Two more positive things to finish.

Mediaeval guilds in some cities forbid the dyeing of cloth or wool by dipping it into two dyes of different colour, because the different colours each had their own guilds! The claim is that green was particularly expensive, because in many places the blue and yellow dyers weren't allowed to use the other's colours. Whether this is true or not I don't know. Casual Googlification yielded nothing concrete.

Two Latin words for black are ater (a dark, matte black) and niger (a glossy black). The former is the source of English "atrocious" (via Latin atrox, "cruel").